(2009-03-17) Cobe Big Bang Science

The back of the XKCD ScienceItWorksBitches T-Shirt shows a graph from the COBE project that ran 1989-1995. The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), also referred to as Explorer 66, was a satellite dedicated to cosmology. Its goals were to investigate the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) of the universe and provide measurements that would help shape our understanding of the cosmos. This work provided supporting evidence for the Big Bang theory of the universe; it showed that the CMB was a near-perfect black body spectrum and that it had very faint anisotropies. Two of COBE's principal investigators, George Smoot and John Mather, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for their work on the project.

• George Smoot recently had a cameo in the silly series Big BangTheory.